The Winter Companion (Parish Orphans of Devon #4) - Mimi Matthews Page 0,98

mother brought me to see the squire, to confront him about his son’s intentions. He called in Mr. Bryce-Chetwynde, and…he denied me. He said he’d only been kind.”

“He c-called you a liar?”

“No. And that’s the rub of it. He admitted to everything—everything except the kiss. He painted a picture of me as a little mouse of a girl desperate for affection, who had taken his civility—his kindness—and spun it into a romance. And you know—” Her voice broke. “I thought I must have done. For when I next saw him, he looked at me so coldly. As if I didn’t exist at all. As if I were a nonperson. And I knew I’d got it all wrong. That they were right. I’d made it up. Imagined it. Because I’d wanted so badly for it to be true. For him to have cared for me.”

Neville’s chest tightened. Somewhere, in the back of his consciousness, his overloaded brain conjured the memory of Clara perched atop a boulder on the beach, her hands cradling his face, as the storm and sea raged all about them.

“You did mean me, didn’t you?” she’d asked. “That I’m the one you wish to kiss? I wasn’t imagining it, was I?”

He knew now why it was she’d doubted his intentions.

“The scandal was too much to overcome,” she said. “I lost my position at the school, and my brother lost his tutor and the patronage of the squire. I took a job as a companion to a lady in York, and my mother found employment at a girls’ academy in Scotland. We agreed to combine our incomes to help pay for Simon to be sent away to school. And then, when he went to university, we did the same. It was the least I could do to make up for all of my silliness. For making our family a spectacle and damaging Simon’s prospects.”

Neville closed the distance between them, coming to stand with her in front of the window. His searched her tearstained face. “But you didn’t make it up,” he said. “Did you?”

Clara wiped her cheeks with her hands, inwardly cursing her lack of self-control. She’d known when she left Simon at the coffee shop that she was due for an all-consuming bout of tears. What she hadn’t reckoned on was running smack into Neville Cross.

The sight of him standing at the front desk of the tavern had fairly taken her breath away. He’d been garbed in a heavy greatcoat, his shoulders appearing at least a mile wide. He’d looked solid and strong and rather thrillingly disheveled—his blond hair windblown and his jaw darkened with a day’s growth of golden stubble.

He’d traveled straight through the night to get to her. Not even stopping to sleep or to shave. All because he’d thought she might need someone.

But she hadn’t known that at the time. All she’d known was that she wanted nothing more than the formidable safety of his arms.

He’d been more than willing to give it to her.

Great goodness. He’d left Devon. The thing he was most afraid to do. And he’d done it. For her.

But she couldn’t reflect on any of that now. The thought of how brave he’d been—the courage it must have taken—only served to make her more emotional.

“No. I didn’t make it up.” She gave a choked laugh. “Not but that I didn’t convince myself that I had.”

He looked incredulous. “You believed him…over yourself? Over your own knowledge of…of what happened?”

“Everyone else did,” Clara said.

They’d more than believed him. They’d vilified her. She’d been called a fantasist. An outright liar.

“I never said anything about marrying her,” Mr. Bryce-Chetwynde had declared to his father.

“You did,” Clara had insisted. “‘When next we kiss, it will be as man and wife.’ You said that to me in the meadow.”

“I said nothing of the sort, Miss Hartwright.”

“But you did, I know it.”

And he had said it—or some variation thereof. When next we kiss, we will be man and wife. Or: When next we kiss it will be the kiss of man and wife. Clara could no longer be certain